Networks have grown increasingly complex in today's communications environments. Networks can use quality of service (QoS) fields in network data to indicate per hop priority, which network infrastructure can use when handling particular types of data. This can enable the network to behave according to the priority of the data packets such that the QoS field controls packet prioritization through queuing, scheduling, and dropping of packets for hops across the network. This per hop handling does not affect transmission reliability and it does not affect how reliably an individual data packet is received without error.